Women Worth Knowing–Who?

I am having a lot of fun with the Women Worth Knowing project. I love getting to know more about these fantastic women, and am hoping this will grow some arms and women who have participated already will introduce us to the women they know. And, I’m hoping that will bring more diversity.

I’m pretty white. I’m about as white as you can get without having a medical condition (except that right now I am kind of faux wood finish colored, since I visited Planet Tan yesterday.) I live in a mostly white neighborhood, work in a mostly white office, and have almost exclusively white friends. I’m really not sure how that happened. I certainly didn’t make it a point to be so Wonder Bread!

In all seriousness, since a big part of my last two corporate jobs had to do with diversity and inclusion I am hyper-aware of what my world looks like from the outside, and hyper-aware of the fact that the WWK is very one slice of pie so far. I am missing entire demographics.

We are off to a good start. Currently, we are representing women from their late 20s through their 60s, single, married, with children and without, of varying faiths, heterosexual and bisexual, artists, scientists, secretaries, domestic engineers, and all sorts of other careers. But, we are missing Black women, Native American women, Asian women, younger women, gay women, politicians, women in the military, and a thousand other things. I want this to be bigger and better.

I hate categorizing. I hate the idea of saying, “We need X of Y in order to look like Z.” That’s not what I am after. I am after women being able to pull up this project and say, “That’s someone who looks like me, who is doing something I wish I were doing, and someone I could emulate.” I don’t believe in tokenism. I believe in inclusion, and I worry that this project looks exclusionary based on my small world.